The invention relates to a method and an apparatus for distributing communications to mobile recipients.
Such a method is known from European patent application 1 073 293 and from international patent application WO 01/50793. According to these known methods, mobile, addressable telecommunication devices, according to these examples mobile telephones, are registered in a database and, on the basis of data stored in the database, which determine for the respective devices to what extent advertising messages may be sent to these devices, advertising messages to be distributed are sent to the respective devices.
A drawback of these manners of distributing advertising messages is that they are sent as separate communications, which involves relatively high costs, and the user of the device on which the message has been received needs to separately operate and consult the device in reaction to signaling receipt of a message, to then conclude that the received communication merely contains an advertising message. A further drawback is that the advertising messages can only be distributed to devices of users who are registered, which limits the size of the population of users to whom the advertisement can be sent.
A variant of such a method is described in international patent application WO 01/22748, according to which, by means of a mobile telecommunication device, a request is sent to receive messages, such as route information or information regarding places which are touristically or otherwise important, depending on the occurrence of certain conditions, such as the position of the device, which may, for instance, have been determined by means of an incorporated GPS receiver. Here, it is provided that communications are sent in combination with an advertising message to be distributed if space is present for this. Although this obviates the drawbacks that the advertising messages are separately sent and the user needs to separately operate and consult his device when the advertising message is received, the population of users of mobile devices which can be reached with advertisements is further limited, because they can only be reached if they have requested conditional requests for sending information and if the respective condition which occasions the sending of information occurs.